For the first time, the European Mars Conference (EMC) took place in Innsbruck, Austria (22-24 September 2017). Together with the University of Innsbruck, we had the pleasure to host about 60 participants from all over Europe.

Student Forum on Friday, 22 Sep 2017

Another first was the EMC17 student forum on Friday. Students between 15-25 years had the opportunity to present in 15min oral presentations their scientific work on Mars and space exploration. Topics can ranged from 3D printing, settling in Martian caves, copters, propellers, physics of ice sublimation in caves on Mars and spacesuit design.

Special mention to Teresa Treichl, Astrid Pflügler and Patricia Friedl for their concept for settling caves on Mars! Congratulations! #EMC17pic.twitter.com/e38reuYT2X

Artemis Westenberg from the jury pointed out that the student forum covered very diverse topics, which is necessary if you want to send humans to Mars.
Silvia Prock from the University of Innsbruck said that is was very difficult as a jury to choose one winner. All of the students are winners.
Finally Sophie Gruber was announced as winner of the student contest, for her presentation “Stability of Martian subsurface ice in caves”. Congratulations!

Gernot Grömer, EMC host opened the conference with a lecture on the OeWF Mars Analog Missions. All started back in 2003 when Groemer was selected as crew member of Crew 11 at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah. The first OeWF Mars Analog Mission followed in 2006 with an all-Austrian MDRS crew “AustroMars”, which led then to implementation of PolAres program and development of the Aouda spacesuit simulator. In 2009 something small and bad happened, which was a true game changer in how we work – Safety must stand above all other interests.

Saturday 23 September 2017

Technical session 1: Life without water and AMADEE-18 Mars simulation

The morning started with a keynote address on Astrobiology by Armando Azua-Bustos from the Centro de Astrobiología in Spain. He explained us why the Atacama Desert in Chile is an extremely dry place. Therefore, it makes sense to look for life in this desert as water is extremely rare. Moreover, this makes it a perfect Mars Analog. As an example, Mr. Azua-Bustos showed us an alga living on spider-nets in the Atacama, to use the morning dew on the net.

Summing up the morning session, Gernot Grömer introduced the “Next Big One” -> AMADEE-18. In February 2018, the Austrian Space Forum will conduct a 4-week Mars Simulation in the Sultanate of Oman. The mission framework also includes several innovative concepts, such as the Analog Mission Performance (AMP) metric – to measure the success of Mars simulations from different aspects as well as it can serve as a benchmarking tool for analog research.

Tricia Larose challenged the audience with ethical questions about the human journey to Mars. Although it was a controversial topic, Tricia Larose pointed out various aspects of crewed space flight we would have to consider before thinking about going to Mars. Speaking about cloning, she left the audience with a sentence, which for sure was keeping some minds busy: We cannot only make people, we can also make parts for people.

OeWF Social Media Team Lead Olivia Haider then summarized the best practices and lessons learned from previous #simulateMars missions and explained that social media is a perfect science communication tool, as you can reach more than 10,000 people with one tweet if you write in a precise and understandable way. She invited the audience to get active on Social Media and promote #simulateMars as important step to prepare humans for Mars.

Innovative rover #1: Tibor Pacher from PuliSpace team introduce us to their rover, who works with wags instead of wheels (wags stand for wheels & legs). PuliSpace team came to life with the Google Lunar XPrize about 7 years ago. In 2013 they went with us to #simulateMars in Morocco to proof that the rover can move on rough terrain and moreover can be successfully controlled by a Mission Control Center in Budapest. The biggest challenge came later in 2013 when they went to Mauna Key, Hawaii, were the nearly lost the rover. Despite PuliSpace is not within the final 5 within GLXP, they continue to work on the rover to bring a piece of Hungary to the Moon.

Jürgen Herholz from the German Mars Society focused in his talk on how to ensure human safety in spaceflight and mentioned also recent example of how space hardware can fail & bring humans in danger (e.g. spacesuit incident of Luca Parmitano were he nearly drowned). To ensure safety of humans for Mars its necessary to adapt design and documentation with provision of redundancies, oversizing, inspections & much more.

Humans are just as much part of spaceflight as hardware – how does ensuring their safety impact design?Tech sesh 5 w/ Jürgen Herholz! #emc17pic.twitter.com/hQmgpyQY8I

The Poland Mars Analog Simulation (PMAS) who was recently conducted in Pila and Torun in Poland was then summarized by PMAS flight director Reinhard Tlustos. Six analogue astronauts conducted experiments during 2-weeks in a newly habitat – the Modular Analogue Research Station (M.A.R.S.) provided by Space Garden Company. Fun fact: The same company who built the M.A.R.S habitat build the habitat for the movie “The Martian”.

Robert Zubrin founder and president of The Mars Society concluded the day with his keynote lecture via Skype.

He also challenged us with some interesting hypothesis, as he thinks that SpaceX like companies will be established soon in Europe, India and China. The audience doubted this, but he mentioned Virgin Galactic as European example.

Besides he pointed out his disregard concerning the Curiosity landing side. Why did we not send this expensive rover not to an interesting part on Mars, were water is supposed? There are too many rules for going to Mars.

Jorge Vago, project scientist of the European ExoMars waked us up with the newest insights of the mission. ExoMars rover is a little bit smaller than Curiosity (300 kg vs. 900 kg), but equipped with the most expensive experiment ESA ever built the MOMA (Mars Organics Molecule Analyser). This experiment will have a key role in detecting life.

Pierre Brisson from the Mars Society Switzerland continued with an intriguing topic: “Exploring Mars to know more about the process of leading to life”. Is it possible that on Mars complex organic molecules developed? The answer to this question is to go there and look for it. Brisson also criticize that rules like from COSPAR (Committee of Space Research) prevents us from sending rover & humans to the really interesting sites on Mars.

An update on the flag ship project “Miriam-2” of the German Mars Society was giving then by Tanja Lehmann. In their last parabolic flight campaign in 2015 they discovered some issues with deployment mechanism and are currently improving it to test it again in the next ESA parabolic flight campaign.

A different approach in designing a Martian outpost presented Federico Monaco from the University of Parma. He and his team suggest a Co-design approach to involve people outside the space community similar to what citizen-science organisation are doing. Very interesting approach.

Artemis Westenberg, co-founder of Explore Mars concluded the morning session with a very interesting talk on policy initiatives of Explore Mars and how the “Human To Mars” summit was born. Moreover, she pointed out that we need to get in the process of how NASA gets money (via US congress) and ensure that Mars is part of this money.

The EMC17 then was concluded with an interesting panel discussion on: “Going Red: Mars exploration, space advocacy, citizen science and policy as allies or adversaries?” Panelist Gernot Grömer, Artemis Westenberg and Lukasz Wilczyński, discussed different aspects of how get people & politicians interested in sending humans to Mars.